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outside her control. Her adulterous initiation into sexual passion, which her marriage was devoid of, set off an ancient behavioral pattern in her siren DNA. Theirs is not a grand passion, nor is it the greatest example of romantic egoism since Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, as she thinks. Not even close!
    From my perspective, Marlena Bellum and Harry Drake are as explosive together as a stick of dynamite and a blowtorch. Their affair repeats an accursed relationship I had with Harry's grandfather, back in that town I never should have set foot in.
    This secret has been kept from Marlena, as well as the story of how I unintentionally set off the curse that haunts our family. When she was a child, I asked Chloe not to reveal our siren history to Marlena, partly in deference to Faith, but mostly for fear the invisible forces loitering in Alta might be listening in.
    But, I said that if my story was ever needed to save us from future catastrophe, then Chloe might tell it—with my guidance, of course. Faith has tried to keep clear of us, having refused to accept that either she or her daughter is a siren.
    “ There are no sirens in the Bible, and I've never met one in Ohio,” Faith said when she visited me on my deathbed, but the blaze in her eyes was siren, not human. Anyway, Marlena's beauty, predilections, and special gifts would indicate Faith, as usual, is dead wrong. I trust in Chloe's judgment, and when Chloe says the moment has arrived to educate Marlena, I will be the first one at the reunion, body or no body.
    If I could spare our young cousin the pain that goes with a siren's education, I would. Alas, my dreams indicate otherwise. We may already be too late in the game to prevent unintended consequences and mitigate disaster for Marlena and the citizens of Alta, both the living and the dead.
    A twenty-first century expression comes to mind, one the young woman of the future will write on her magic tablet : “No pain, no gain. LOL.”

Chapter Two
The Birth Mother
December 21 , 1976

Rapid City, South Dakota
    “No smoking here, boy,” says the visiting nurse, pausing at the door, her scanty eyebrows a-twitch. “What with the oxygen tank and all the trash in this room, we might go up in flames.” 
    The half-blooded Native American continues to smoke a cheroot while contemplating the old man on the bed. The young man is strikingly tall, with sculpted cheekbones, topaz eyes, and sultry hair that is long, curly, and black, except for a few burnt-red ends.
    The corpse surprises him by speaking . “Ain't much of a nurse,” Caesar Lawless declares with a ghastly smile.
    “ Not much to look at neither,” Dakota Lawless rejoins. “White-Eye bitch that ugly should put out for free. You oughta know.”
    The dying man chortles, obviously pleased with his son's reference to past conquests. “Them was the days…ha, ha, ha.”
    The nurse turns red, spins on her heel, and slams the door, which breaks from its rotten casing and falls, landing with a loud thud and raising a thick cloud of dust.
    Dakota is motionless, staring at the shell of his seventy-four-year-old father with mingled pity and contempt. Caesar always believed he was irresistible to women. He had settled down only once in his life, briefly and at age fifty, after impregnating the fifteen-year-old daughter of a Lakota Sioux shaman. They moved into a shabby, single-room walkup in Rapid City, where the teenager died, essentially of starvation, a month after giving birth to Dakota. She is buried in a pauper's grave outside of town.
    Caesar licks his chapped lips, then gasps, “Last night…I heard her tapping at the window.”
    “ My dead mother?”
    “ Yes. Your mother wanted me to tell you…about Nevada Carson. It was her I was speaking of…before that nurse butted in. Your mother said you should know as much as I do…about my rich and famous birth mother. Your grandmother is…still alive.”
    D akota frowns. Just like Pa, waiting for death to have him